Targeting the poor
Subtitle: evidence from a field experiment in Indonesia
By: Vivi Alatas ... [et al.].
Contributors: National Bureau of Economic Research
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 15980; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 15980.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] :
Description: "In developing countries, identifying the poor for redistribution or social insurance is challenging because the government lacks information about people's incomes.  This paper reports the results of a field experiment conducted in 640 Indonesian villages that investigated two main approaches to solving this problem: proxy-means tests, where a census of hard-to-hide assets is used to predict consumption, and community-based targeting, where villagers rank everyone on a scale from richest to poorest.  When poverty is defined using per-capita expenditure and the common PPP$2 per day threshold, we find that community-based targeting performs worse in identifying the poor than proxy-means tests, particularly near the threshold.  This worse performance does not appear to be due to elite capture.  Instead, communities appear to be using a different concept of poverty: the results of community-based methods are more correlated with how individual community members rank each other and with villagers' self-assessments of their own status than per-capita expenditure.  Consistent with this, the community-based methods result in higher satisfaction with beneficiary lists and the targeting process"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 5/20/2010.

Includes bibliographical references.

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